The radical proliferation of syndicated content on the World Wide Web, followed more recently by the emergence of so-called Web 2.0 services, evidences a strong desire within the Internet user community for a self-defined environment. In one sense, the use of syndicated content and services such as mashups is highly personalized. Each use can define a very specific, individual view of a universe of syndicated content, and offer customized services built upon third-party programming interfaces. In another sense, the syndication environment is highly collaborative and participatory, with communities of interest arising quickly and assembling around topics or points of view, and sometimes dissipating just as quickly. In either case, content and services change rapidly according to user activity.
Numerous approaches to dynamically deploying services across a network have been devised such as Microsoft's .NET technology, or web services using, e.g., the Web Services Description Language (“WSDL”). While these technology infrastructures support discovery and use of services across a network and can accommodate an evolving set of network-accessible services, would-be users are constrained by the corresponding conceptual and syntactic frameworks. A current trend in Internet services appears to be sharply diverging from this canned approach. Instead, various web-accessible programming interfaces are being published for general use, and these interfaces are discovered and combined on an ad hoc basis by end users. As new programming interfaces and services appear, additional uses and combinations are recognized and deployed in “mashups” that can in turn be republished as web sites or new programming interfaces.
There remains a need for generalized tools to support the creation and use of ad hoc networked services, as well as a single point of contact for computing across the domain of content and services available on the Internet.